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Robo Love

A few months ago I wrote a magazine article about scientists who are building robots capable of a rudimentary form of sociability. As part of my research, I spent a few days at the humanoid robotics laboratory at M.I.T. And I admit: I developed a little crush on one of the robots. The object of my affection was Domo, a man-size machine with a buff torso and big blue eyes, a cross between He-Man and the Chrysler Building; when it gripped my hand in its strong rubbery pincers I felt a kind of thrill. So I was primed for the basic premise of David Levy’s provocative new book, “Love and Sex With Robots”: that there will soon come a day when people fall in love with robots and want them for companions, friends, love objects and possibly even partners for sex and marriage.

That day is imminent, Levy writes, especially the sex part. By the middle of this century, he predicts, “love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans, while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals combined.”

If this seems a bit much, hang on. Levy, an expert on artificial intelligence and the author of “Robots Unlimited,” builds his case gradually. He begins with what scientists know about why humans fall in love with other humans. There are 10 factors, he writes, including mystery, reciprocal liking, and readiness to enter a relationship. Why can’t these factors apply to robots, too? Even something as apparently human as “reciprocal liking” can be programmed into a robot’s behavior, and if it acts as if it likes you that’s often all that matters.

Next, Levy points out that we’re perfectly capable of falling in love with non-humans, including our pets, our teddy bears, our computers and our computerized pets (remember the Furby and Tamagotchi crazes a few years ago?). Once you realize how easy it is to think of your own laptop as a sympathetic friend, how much more difficult is it to imagine having fond feelings for a robot programmed to interact with you in exactly the way your heart desires?

Photo

Credit
Henning Wagenbreth

Humans, Levy writes, are hard-wired to impute emotions onto anything with which we’re in intimate contact, to feel love for objects both animate and inanimate. And robots, he argues, might turn out to be even more lovable than some humans. By 2025 “at the latest,” he predicts, “artificial-emotion technologies” will allow robots to be more emotionally available than the typical American human male. “The idea that a robot could like you might at first seem a little creepy, but if that robot’s behavior is completely consistent with it liking you, then why should you doubt it?”

When it comes to the even creepier prospect of a robot wanting to have sex with you, Levy takes a similar step-by-step approach. First, he explores why people have sex with other people (for “pure pleasure,” “to express emotional closeness,” “because your partner wants to”). He then moves on to why we have sex with a range of artificial objects, from plain old white-bread vibrators to elaborate mechanical contraptions with names like the Thrillhammer and the Stallion XL. He begins with sex toys you hold in your own hand and progresses to ones you engage in with another person: telephone sex for starters, followed by dildonics (computer-controlled sex devices) and then remote-controlled “teledildonics.”

Robot sex already exists, sort of, in the form of sex dolls — generally slim, big-breasted females with pliable “cyberskin” and a fake heartbeat that increases as the doll mimics arousal. Levy helpfully includes the addresses for Web sites where such dolls can be purchased today for several thousand dollars each. He also writes about the “doll experience rooms” in many Korean hotels (25,000 won, or about $25 an hour), which sprang up after that country cracked down on prostitution in 2004. There was some debate over whether paying for sex with dolls was also illegal, but for now, according to Levy, the prostitution ban applies only to intercourse with other humans.

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Throughout the book, Levy builds up his case almost clinically, as though he’s just trying to bring the reader up to speed on an inevitable social development. But despite my own brief robot crush, I would have appreciated a little ironic distance. Levy simply embraces the sexy robots in our future, whether they are a sensitive cybermale or an adoring female robot that is like “a Stepford wife, but without her level of built-in subservience.” But it isn’t the subservience that makes the uniform, unthinking, unblinking Stepford wives so unnerving; it’s the fact that they are — hello! — robots.

In making his case, Levy cites the gradual shift in the public view of what is acceptable in terms of sexual pairings. People used to be widely appalled by such variations as oral sex, masturbation and homosexuality, but today these practices are “widely regarded as thoroughly normal and as leading to fulfilling relationships and satisfactory sex lives.” All he wants is for us to open our minds a tiny bit more, and make room for the idea of having sex with the domestic robots that will soon be part of all our lives. In fact, he argues, the human/robot sex of the future promises to be better than most sex between humans is today.

Levy spends so much time laying out his logical arguments about how and why we will fall in love with robots that he gives short shrift to the bigger questions of whether we would really want to. I’d have liked a little less gee-whiz, and a little more examination about whether a sexbot in every home, a Kama Sutra on legs that never tires, never says no, and never has needs of its own is what we really want.

LOVE AND SEX WITH ROBOTS

The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships.

By David Levy.

Illustrated. 334 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.95.

Robin Marantz Henig, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, is the author, most recently, of “Pandora’s Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page 714 of the New York edition with the headline: Robo Love. Today's Paper|Subscribe